The personal blog of a Toronto based software mechanic, musician, sound designer, and theatre enthusiast.

I’ve been silent about my work for a few weeks, which is a shame, because one of the top reasons why I accepted a job with Mozilla Messaging was because I was free to talk about what I was doing.

I’ve been neglecting that right, but only because I’ve been holy shit busy. I’ve been blitzing my Ubuntu Unity integration work like a MoFo, and have gotten two Thunderbird extensions up on Mozilla Labs:

Ubuntu One

Ubuntu One is a service that allows you to sync things like files, bookmarks and contacts between different computers. (Incidentally, Mozilla has their own service called Sync to do something similar with bookmarks and passwords.)

That’s a pretty cool idea. Imagine it – you get a brand new computer, hook it up to Ubuntu One, and blam: all of your bookmarks and contacts are already there waiting for you.

Currently, however, Thunderbird does not support sharing contacts via Ubuntu One.

And that’s what I’m tackling next.

Ubuntu One Contacts Integration

At this point, my goal is to write an extension that will add a new address book to Thunderbird. Any contacts that are currently stored and shared via Ubuntu One will appear in that address book.

I’ll deal with adding new contacts later – for now, I’ll just do read-only, to keep the complexity down.

Contact sync with Ubuntu One is already possible with the Funambol add-on. The only problem is that there is no official release of Funambol for Thunderbird 3.1, just some developer release. However, I have try it and it works great.
Next problem is that actually, contact sync via Funambol require to pay a UbuntuOne mobile account which cost 3.99$/month and offer music sync which is not really useful for me…

Ah, yes. Communicating with Evolution. In a way, that’s kind of what I’m doing: contacts in Evolution can already be stored in Ubuntu One. Thunderbird will be able to access those contacts too. This means that if a user wants to migrate their contacts from Evolution to Thunderbird…it’s already done for them. Pretty cool!

@Mike Obviously (with my email address) I don’t have Ubuntu One here, because Ubuntu’s overlords never released it for any other distro (not that I would be keen to put my data into their proprietary service anyway; I could use Google apps). Besides, syncing with e-d-s seems to be really great thing, which is now missing from TB.

Interesting work. At the moment I’m having problems with syncing Thunderbird (contacts and calendar, via Lightning) with my mobile phone (N900). A syncevolution plugin for Thunderbird would be great; sync in general is something that is sorely needed in Thunderbird so I’m glad you’re taking this kind of thing up. Albeit, I’m not an Ubuntu user.

Great work Mike. I can’t wait for NN. This looks pretty cool. I wanted to test it but I couldn’t get Natty Narwal with the Unity desktop to work in my VM Ware.

I am also looking forward to the Ubuntu One expansion for Thunderbird contacts. Have you considered to support calender as well? Right now I am using a Funambol/Syncevolution for Thunderbird and my N900. But it is a bit of a hassle.

@Mike no offense taken whatsoever. Peace. Just curious … if I am angry with somebody about Ubuntu One, then it is not you. And actually, after the Banshee blunder, I may be happy not to have anything common with it.

the funambol thunderbird extension is already capable of doing sync of contacts and calendar with any syncml server.
We still have a few bugs on tb 3 that prevent us to do an official release, and we lack someone willing to take care of the project, but the core functionalities are there. As you know, ubuntu one contacts sync is already powered by funambol, have you considered helping us fixing the bugs instead of writing the extension from scratch?
If you (or someone else) want to contribute, feel free to join the project at https://mozilla-plugin.forge.funambol.org/ and/or write to me at mapelli at funambol dot com. We do also have some money to reward maintainers and major contributors.

What I like about what Mike is working on is that it will not require a cell phone like funambol does. Some people just need to synch from the desktop TB to something like UbuntuOne and this looks like a great option.

Your work on the Ubuntu projects sounds progressive – good concept!…I’m looking for some help on an new concept – we want wrap our developments around Thunderbird and looking for a good Thunderbird developer. We expect to pay for the assistance. Are you interested? If not, can you recommend anybody?

While a SyncML based solution is possible, it isn’t the most efficient way to handle Ubuntu One contacts on the desktop. The Funambol based SyncML server for Ubuntu One will synchronise your bookmarks with the CouchDB in the cloud, so there would be a replication delay for changes to propagate between Thunderbird and any other local applications accessing the contacts.

In contrast, accessing the local desktopcouch instance means Thunderbird would have the same view of the contacts that all other local applications see, and can rely on the desktopcouch replication to handle synchronisation with other computers. So there is definitely value in the work Mike is doing.

While a SyncML based solution is possible, it isn’t the most efficient way
to handle Ubuntu One contacts on the desktop.

I heartily agree.

The Funambol based SyncML server for Ubuntu One will synchronise your bookmarks with the CouchDB in the cloud, so there would be a replication delay for changes to propagate between Thunderbird and any other local applications accessing the contacts.

That’s another very good point – we sync via SyncML, and then Ubuntu One sends them back to our local DesktopCouch. Sounds a bit backwards, doesn’t it?

I tested both extension in NN and as (Ubuntu) Thunderbird user i really appreciate this kind of integration! This are just some ideas and toughs as an regular (Ubuntu) Thunderbird user:

GNOME

In Ubuntu (GNOME2) if you use Thunderbird and click on file(s) –> “Send To…” it just doesn’t work and i don’t know if it ever did or if it will in NN. Right now i can’t test it in NN because “Send-To…” –> does not show mail option. In MM it does open new message and attach files but if file(s) and path to it contains whitespaces or “special” characters you will not be able to send the mail. “Send To…” –> Thunderbird produces % characters in name of attachment and it does not work. It only works with drag & drop and if u manually click in new message toolbar and click the button Attach. Then % characters are not produced.

If Ubuntu user want all the things you are working on to work (indicators) Thunderbird must be running as “back-end” 24/7.

-Should Thunderbird “minimize” when close button is pressed by user?
-If Launcher API allows this, should Thunderbird icon in launcher look like regular “opened application” (triangle on the left and to “Light Up”) or it could/should be just “plain non bloated icon” for 24/7 usage?

I really appreciate your work,
Evolution is so bulky to use, while thunderbird appears so smooth.
I can wait for all of these tweaks to be compatible with the stable thunderbird release
hoping at some point, that ubuntu will ship with thunderbird!!

Ubuntu Oneiric is shipping Thunderbird with my EDS Contacts Integration add-on built in, which means that, yes, users should be able to access and write to their Ubuntu One contacts, so long as that add-on is enabled.